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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

His many translations include a prose rendition of Homer's Odyssey (1964) as well as selections from The Bible. He also translated from Sumerian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and numerous dead languages.

Villa's interest in philology informed his work heavily, and he preferred to write in a dialect of Milan rather than in what he thought of as the problematically academic "Ytaglya" of the post-war period. He also commonly inserted ancient Greek, Provençal, French, and many other languages into his poems to create a complicated network informed by his studies.

In 1950, Villa moved to São Paulo where he fell in with the Brazilian concrete poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Those involved with the "Noigandres" group were strongly influenced by writers such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and the visual poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire—all of which had a strong effect on his own writing.

Villa collaborated with a number of writers and artists in Italy and abroad, including Alberto Burri, Marcel Duchamp, as well as William Burroughs. He also had a strong influence on the next generation of neoavanguardia Italian writers—including those involved in Group 63, such as Umberto Eco and Adriano Spatola.

He died in Rietti, Italy in 2003.

by this poet

What's new is that one can no longer keep
the eyelids of swept away young men open
with sharpened toothpicks, they're no longer alive:
what's new is the whitish eyes of Milanese
men upon the wires of trolleys, trams and poles;
don't tell me it's sad to go on looking sadly in each other's eyes!
what's new is

poetry is evanescence
poetry is life sentence, release
on words, liberté sur parole
poetry is a blind guide to an ancient
enigma, to an inaccessible
secret
poetry is an argument
dynamic and jarring
poetry is a rag tag cos-
mology we can
raise and wave,
it's a small (abregée) cos-

It could be
that on any given
day air would travel
half-heartedly through the air,
maybe, but if Lake Garda fails to recover in time
all the dust eaten by cyclists in meaningless races,
and kilometers that don't count, good for nothing,
maybe, as long as the ozone and the horizontal rain
speak to traffic cops